We don't get drums
by Runespoor
Summary: There are two things to wait for: the next letter, and the war to end. WWI AU. [gen focus, mentioned NejiHina, implied T7 tension.]


**Notes:** Boche was slang of the time for German, Jean Jaurès was a pacifist socialist leader who was murdered on the eve of the war. Title from "La Chanson de Craonne", an anti-war song invented by soldiers around 1917; to sing it was an act of mutiny.

* * *

**We don't get drums**

* * *

1.

"Sakura!"

From outside the window, Ino's voice reaches her ears only as a faint echo, one she's not entirely aware of. Bent over her desk, slowly she recounts the idle details of their daily life. Every so often she has to dip the quill in the ink, and the quill goes from the ink-pot to the paper, relentless and purposeful.

She fancies the words she's writing down prayers or spells. If she could draw at all, she would paint the sun on her letter, and the vibrant green leaves rustling with the wind, and the bleached stones of the houses. She would add the bicycle they used to ride together. But she's not an artist, and it's not her intent to burden him with her pain and her sorrow, poor little girl left behind by the war. He's the soldier, hero on the line, so far away sometimes she fears she's made him up in her mind. The world has come to a fracture, she on one half and he on the other.

She can only hope her words will be enough to bring him back. She writes on the page all the tiny stuff that makes up the town's routine and for a second she fancies herself Penelope weaving her web. She fancies herself Ariadne, the thread of ink on the page a life-line, hopefully strong enough to lead him back to her.

"Sakura, what are you _doing_?" Ino bursts into her room, demanding and impatient, like she's telling the world she will not be ignored. Well. Sakura looks down at the letter on her desk. Maybe she's been writing for more time than she thought she was.

"Sorry, I didn't realize you were waiting," she apologizes.

Ino snorts, one hand on her hip and gesturing with the other. "You didn't realize? Girl, I've called your name half a dozen times! Your mom asked me if I wanted a coffee while I was waiting for you!"

"Sorry," Sakura repeats, standing up and leaving the desk.

"What were you doing anyway?"

Sakura shrugs. "Just... you know. Writing a letter."

It's like the sun has been snuffed out in the room. For a heartbeat they're both silent and still, and Ino's eyes slide to the desk behind Sakura, to the letter she hasn't finished yet.

"Oh," Ino says, and she doesn't add anything else. Sakura isn't the only one whose friends were made into soldiers. Ino too writes letters.

Ino's eyes settle back into looking straight at her. "Let's go then, it's already late."

It's not that it was a moment and it was broken, Sakura thinks as she follows Ino down the stairs and outside and into the sun. The moment slid neatly into the next, writing letters and going to buy groceries and being scared out of their minds and waiting.

"You think we can find Sai?" she asks.

Ino's footsteps stutter a second next to her, which is an obvious tell, but Sakura tactfully doesn't mention it.

Teasing Ino about her crush is hilarious, but it'd distract her. Also, Sakura is almost ready to give up on Ino doing anything about it.

When they were younger, Ino used to be a lot more proactive, but ever since they became young ladies, she's learned to rely on subtlety. Until Sai, it served her well; but Sakura's been with Ino when Ino was doing everything she could to get Sai to notice her and understand she would welcome his attentions, and she's as much at her wits' ends as Ino, for all that she encourages Ino to be franker.

It's easy for her to say, Ino would retort. She's not the one whose reputation as a flirt is _failing_ her.

"Sure," Ino answers, not guarded so much as uncertain, "why?"

"I'd like him to draw something for me."

The sun is beautiful, and the trees. If she can't enclose them in her letter, maybe she can send him something so he won't miss them as much as she misses him.

* * *

2.

It's not always grey in the trenches.

Or, well, it is, but the amazing thing is that it's basically just as grey when it's pouring down like God's having a bitchy fit and is trying to drown everyone down there – which, by the way, he has words about it, all though he can get behind the sentiment sometimes – and when the sun's shining over their heads, like weighting three tons of metal is going to convince anyone it's not some jumped-up centime that's been polished like it could pass off for a franc.

Naruto's theory is that it's cause the earth is grey, here. Grey from what, he's not sure, given that the ground around here's been rained on with enough blood that the rains should rightly wash off crimson. Maybe it's the lead, sprayed over the earth like seed, so much that it'd barely register as a miracle if the earth just started sprouting spare limbs and soldiers, all in uniforms and with rifles that should rightly work better than they seem to do.

When he says that, Sasuke tells him to shut up and stop his stupid jokes, which tells Naruto that he probably did mean it as joke, but he gets in Sasuke's face about it anyway, because where does Sasuke get off ordering him about, huh?

Once, Sasuke replied that the Earth had already grown its crop, and it was being sown as they spoke. He'd nodded at everyone around, uniforms so covered in dirt and water and other things that their colors were unrecognizable, almost faceless behind all the shit, and he said, there.

"Mud-soldiers", he said, and he'd choked on something that sounded almost like a giggle.

Since then Naruto tries to keep his theory to himself, because Sasuke losing it is a whole lot scarier than rats feeding on your toes while you're sleeping, and if he can avoid to add to that burden he will. Still, sometimes it slips out, because Sasuke maybe kinda had a point about Naruto's brain-to-mouth filter, and Naruto spent the last decade of his life treating Sasuke as another half of himself.

"That's as annoying as you make it sound," Sasuke retorts when Naruto explains why he tells Sasuke stuff he doesn't tell anyone else.

"Admit it, you'd get bored," Naruto grins.

He doesn't get angry at Sasuke for denying what is obvious to him anymore, partly because he's pretty sure Sasuke is doing exaclty the same thing he is, except that to Sasuke treating another as part of oneself involves bitching and downplaying emotional attachment. Which, given what Naruto's seen of Sasuke's family, does make a tragic amount of sense.

Sasuke just sneers.

That's Naruto's cue to whip out Sakura's latest letter. Generally Sasuke can keep the banter up and insult Naruto and everyone else sixty ways to Sunday; you've got to know him well to realize it's practically affection. Hey, at least he acknowledges you exist. It's when he doesn't bother that Naruto feels the worry gnawing at him. He's not losing Sasuke over to shell shock or war depression, not if he can help it; he's not losing him to mustard gas or Boche fire or the common cold. He hasn't so far, and he's really determined to see this through its ugly end without losing his best friend. Naruto just doesn't deal well with losing people.

News from Sakura are the best thing in this hellhole. It's comforting in ways that hot soup can never hope to be; the proof of an existence outside the trench.

Naruto reads aloud, halting whenever she uses a word he's not too familiar with, and he can see the chimneys of the factory spewing black ribbons into the blue air, and the green of the trees and the green of the grass and the green of her eyes. He can see the high, blond ponytail of Ino bobbing when Sakura talks about Ino's crush on some crippled new guy who paints.

Then there's a break; a whole paragraph that's been blacked out, which Naruto keeps to himself. Instead he makes something up about days-old kittens. Privately he wonders what Sakura could be talking about that would draw the censors' ire, but it's not worth drawing Sasuke's attention to it.

He thinks Shikamaru is onto him when Shika glances at him mid-way through the first sentence he adlibs, but Shika doesn't say anything, so that's good. It's possible Sasuke knows he's making up just a little bit – he doesn't change one of Sakura's words, even when he's not sure what they mean, but come on, there's one paragraph she wrote and they can't read it, one entire paragraph of real life that they have a right to, so he makes up something to replace what's been taken from them – but he listens.

When Naruto's done reading and he carefully folds it back and into his pocket, the corner of Sasuke's lips are curled into a faint smile.

They're not alone, too; besides Shika, who was dozing or pretending too, there's also the captain, leaning against a wooden beam.

Neji's young and it used to be that he was an arrogant prick, but living and sleeping in the trenches with the rest of them common-as-muck soldiers (not that Sasuke's really all that common, but twists of fate have plucked him from the ranks of the elite and shoved him ankle-deep in the muck) has changed that. He's a lot more patient than he used to be. A lot smarter about most things, too. He likes to lurk around when Naruto reads Sakura's letters, or Shikamaru receives one from his mother.

"Hey, captain," Naruto calls with a wave.

Neji takes it in stride, though with his freaky pale eyes Naruto probably wouldn't know if he didn't. He makes a small wave back, and that's when Naruto notices the envelope he's clutching.

"Oh, letter from your sweetheart?"

Neji doesn't smile. "From my- cousin."

* * *

3.

He called her his cousin because it was the truth, and he stumbled over the word because what he wanted to say was, "when we get back home I'm going to ask her to marry me". He doesn't think she'll say yes, but he needs this is he's going to make it out alive.

From the day he looked at the men in the trench and thought "Hinata was right", Neji's been clinging to the promise that when it's over, he'll ask her to marry him.

He wishes he could tell her he was wrong. He does so, in every letter he sends back, but if her responses are any sign, the censors don't let her read it.

It started back before the war did.

Their families had always been close, and when Neji's father died, his twin brother started directing the family's factories, waiting for the day Neji would come of age. Despite the fact that they lived under the same roof for almost fifteen years, few bonds existed between Neji and his uncle's older daughter. Hinata was shy, almost cripplingly so, and Neji couldn't help but resent her for the fact her father was alive, and disdain her for the fact that she was an obvious disappointment. Had _his_ father been alive, Neji knew he'd have made him proud.

He'd always looked at her and found her contemptible. Unforgivably weak.

Back before the war, he found out another reason to loathe her.

It was little touches at first; the odd hours she was sometimes gone without leaving a note, the people that sometimes walked her to the door, staring at her father reading the newspaper and retrieving it for herself. Nothing that caused alarm, nobody paid much attention to what Hinata did with her days. She wasn't a girl who'd cause trouble to her family by making a scandal. In social occasions, she was entirely proper if a wallflower, and she had few friends, none bearing watching as possible bad influences. Her father considered her a bit of a let-down, but not an embarrassment to the family's reputation.

It inflated to a climax one night when she missed dinner with her father and her sister and some business associates who had been prepped to look forward to meeting 'the elusive Miss Hyuuga'.

She came back late that night, her coat and scarf reeking of tobacco, and when her father demanded to know what she'd been off doing at that hour, she replied she'd been at a café, listening to Jean Jaurès.

She came back late that night, her coat and scarf reeking of tobacco, her cheeks tinted rosy in front of her father, demanding to know what she'd been off doing at that hour.

"_I was at a café with friends,"_ she said, undoing the pins that kept her hat fixed to her hair. "_We were listening to Jean Jaurès."_

Jean Jaurès, the socialist. The discordant voice crying for peace when war with Germany was a promise, when everyone, everyone, the whole country, wanted righteous vengeance, and Germany seemed to do nothing but look for an excuse to give them the opportunity.

Neji's limbs had stiffened at Hinata's admission.

"_That man is a traitor, Hinata!"_

"_No, he isn't_," she said. "_He says that we can still avoid the war. A war would do nothing good, nothing except kill more people, thousands and thousands of people. Soldiers who weren't even born the last time, young men with parents and sweethearts and their lives ahead of them. A war would do nothing but bring grief to us, and to them, and in grief there wouldn't be much difference between the two."_ She paused. "_There isn't much difference. The Germans are just like us."_

"_This is nothing but treachery! Treachery and cowardliness speaking, a man trying to poison the minds of his own countrymen, preaching defeatism!_"

Hinata's mouth opened, as though she was about to add something, but her father cut her short. "_And if you agree with him, then you are no better than he is!"_

Neji remembers how her eyes flickered down, the sooty curtains of her eyelashes lowering a moment.

She went to her room as she was ordered, without raising her voice any more. She was almost disinherited that night; after her father tried to keep a leash on her, but she never obeyed. She only conceded never to speak again of the war or Jaurès' name or her activities with her socialist friends.

On the day Jaurès was killed, shot for speaking out against the upcoming war, Neji saw her briefly, looking like she'd cried, cheeks blotched with a red sheen. Awkward in the silence, he'd tried to say something, but nothing came to mind, and soon she shuffled out of the room, disappearing for hours. She'd gone out, he presumed, joining her friends to share their inexplicable pain over the death of a traitor.

He wishes he could tell her she was right. But to write so today would be judged treacherous, and the letter censored. Hinata would never know and never reply; and Neji doesn't want to imagine how lost and alone he would feel, if he read her reply and found no mention of their complicity there. Back away from the front, they don't know what the war is. Civilians don't understand. Only Hinata does; she did before the war even started, foresaw its true nature through the martial tales of glory the times had spun. If she failed to read that he knew she was right, he would lose his kindred spirit, he'd be truly alone for the first time since the war began.

If it's his fate that the war ends before he is killed, he'll able to tell her.


End file.
